


Tears

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 10:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17222156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Katherine was 14 years old when she decided she would be a reporter.





	Tears

Katherine was fourteen when she decided that she would be a reporter. She’d had the idea, of course she had, growing up around newspapers, but it had taken it time to crystallize, and gain precision. It had taken half a dozen rather lackluster attempts at poetry, and days locked up in the attic with a rickety typewriter, pretending that she was Shakespeare, and Dickens, and Thackeray all at once, and it had taken her father making fun of her when she asked him to call her Charles, or William, or Thomas after her heroes. It had taken, more than anything, days and days of scanning books and newspaper headlines for new heroes, women who kept their own names and dared to write.

That’s when Katherine had started to build what she thought of as her portfolio. She read newspapers and wrote her own takes on the stories, trying to dig deeper and uncover filthy truths that the greatest muckrakers of her time had missed. She looked around for things that could be her own stories. Crime interested her, and so she watched the police carefully, and noticed dozens of things that weren’t reported. There were officers who chased barefooted homeless boys away from their sleeping places, and others who seized carts and carriages with very little provocation. Sometimes the city seemed to scream with stories that nobody else heard.

When Katherine was fifteen, she presented her portfolio to her father, on a rainy morning just days after her birthday. He hadn’t wanted to go to the office that day, complaining of bones that ached and ears that rung at the quietest sound. Though Katherine was prone to running through the house like a hurricane, she approached softly this day, and offered her father a cup of tea as he read.

The funny thing was Katherine had been so sure that she could handle rejection bravely. The tears that pricked at the corners of her eyes when he asked her if she was joking came as a complete surprise.

“Even if you weren’t my child a couldn’t publish these,” Pulitzer said. He waved the pages in front of him, then rapped them firmly against the arm of his chair. “We newspaper men, we are responsible for creating the very fabric of this city. We tell people how to think, how to vote…”

Katherine made an impatient grab for her writing, and her father pulled it away for her. She knew all of this. Of course she did. Her father stood up, putting her hands on her arms to still them.

“The kinds of things you’re writing wouldn’t do anybody any good. They’d make people angry about things that they can’t change, and when uneducated people get angry, they become violent. The streets become dangerous for women and children, and it would do you good not to forget that you are both of those things at once. Do I make myself clear?”

Katherine couldn’t answer. Her face was frozen in a scowl, as she tried to fight against the lump in her throat. Her father stroked her cheek, and this scrap of kindness made it even harder for Katherine to keep her calm, but she would not let him see her cry.

“You want to be a writer?” her father asked.

“I will be a writer.”

Her father appeared to think it over, then he handed Katherine’s papers back to her. “Destroy these.”

“What?” Even though Katherine had gone into this venture expecting her father to refuse and not take her seriously, she hadn’t foreseen this order.

“Let me watch you burn them, and I’ll see what I can do to help you. The problem, my dear, is not that young ladies have no place in the newspaper business. It’s that you need someone to carefully teach you what it is. I’ve never said that I was unwilling.”


End file.
